Now the party were led through the gate into the Byrsa district. This was the first formal visit of the Hatti leaders to Carthage since the day of the aborted battle nearly half a year earlier. As Angulli had suggested it didn’t seem to be a day for excessive formality, but a certain precedence emerged anyhow. The Tawananna walked flanked by the city’s two suffetes, while Pyxeas and Nelo’s mother escorted Angulli the priest, and Himuili walked with senior Carthaginian officers. Nelo and the rest of the party followed on behind, with soldiers of both nations flanking them. Interpreters hovered, murmuring into their masters’ ears like bees seeking pollen.

The Hatti were to be taken up to the formal buildings at the Byrsa’s summit where treaties between the nations would be outlined, to be formally written up by scribes on both sides and sealed at a later date. Those Hatti who had not visited this place before visibly tried not to stare at the striking layout of the citadel, the radial avenues leading up to a summit crowned by monumental buildings, and Hannibal’s column at the very apex.

Once there had been shops, offices, fine expensive residences, many buildings rising two, three, four storeys over the streets. Now the shops were closed, the offices empty. But several buildings had been knocked through to make room for new functions. They were manufactories, here in the most secure quarter of the city. As they neared, Nelo could hear the shouts of the workmen, and a hammering noise, metal struck by metal. The suffetes and their aides had been determined that the Hatti should see these workshops. And now through the open doors of one great building they glimpsed the components of more fire-drug weapons being cast. There was a fully functioning forge where workers hammered at lumps of iron, and a carpentry shop where giant wooden formers were constructed, and then a series of great benches where cast-iron strips, white-hot, were hammered flat to be fitted around the formers. Nelo could see the way the manufacture of the weapons went, from one step to the next. And at the finish stood a complete eruptor, the bulbous belly with the stubby nozzle, just as had been unveiled on the plain of battle. The men who laboured in the forge heat were stripped to their loincloths, but they wore gloves that stretched up to cover their forearms, saving their skin from red-hot splashes.

‘More symbols for us to gawp at,’ growled Himuili.

Hastayar gently chided him. ‘Now, General, we’re here on a mission of friendship, and we must be polite. But he’s right, of course,’ she said to Carthalo. ‘You clearly intend to impress on us your capability to churn out these fire pots of yours. You drive home your dominance, like a booted heel driven into the back of a fallen soldier.’

Carthalo smiled. ‘A little crudely put, madam.’

‘But I am right.’